Yan*

Yan (b. 2001, Beijing) is a Chinese artist working across performance, moving image, installation, and sound. His recent research focuses on “Chamber Rap,” a medium developed in collaboration with several contemporary composers (Yang Zhongtian, Xu He, Zhang Yang, Li Xiaoyun). Shaped by the influence of socialism, Yan engages Chamber Rap as a way to examine the relationship between contemporary art and entertainment. His practice is committed to advancing the accessibility of contemporary art, while asking how contemporary art might relate to its audiences. In his work, Yan places the “individual” in confrontation with vast structures such as history, mythology, and natural cycles, tracing processes of struggle, transformation, resistance, and drifting. Rather than constructing the individual as a stable or clearly defined subject, his practice foregrounds the fluidity and contradictions of human beings within complex realities, and the continual reconstruction of the individual in contemporary society.